The disclosed embodiments of the present invention relate to an overdrive technique of a display panel, and more particularly, to an overdrive apparatus for dynamically loading required overdrive look-up tables into table storage devices and related overdrive method thereof.
In recent years, liquid crystal display (LCD) apparatuses have been utilized in various applications such as televisions and personal computers. However, an LCD panel generally has low response speed due to the inherent characteristics of liquid crystal cells. Therefore, overdrive methods have been applied to the LCD panel, in order to increase the response speed. Overdrive processing is a processing method for setting a driving voltage applied to a liquid crystal cell (i.e., a pixel) to be higher than an original one if a direction of pixel data change from a previous frame to a current frame is positive, but setting the driving voltage to be lower than the original one if the direction of pixel data change from the previous frame to the current frame is negative. Specifically, this overdrive method can improve display quality of moving images shown on the LCD panel.
In general, a single overdrive look-up table is employed by the overdrive operation for determining the overdrive values of all pixels in a display area of the LCD panel. More specifically, one table storage device, such as a statistic random access memory (SRAM) device, is used for buffering the overdrive look-up table. However, different regions in the display area of the LCD panel may have different temperatures or different LC cell rotation requirements. In another conventional design, the display area of the display panel is divided into N regions each requiring an overdrive look-up table, and N table storage devices (e.g., N SRAM devices) are needed to buffer these overdrive look-up tables used by the overdrive operation. In other words, overall size of table storage devices employed in the conventional design is quite large, thus increasing the chip size and production cost inevitably.